by David Black
“We’re looking for your son,” Caroline said.
“You’re welcome to play hide-and-seek with him in this old white elephant,” Keating said. “We don’t run into each other much in here.”
“Family’s all anyone’s really got,” Jack quoted Bix.
“Family is what we have to free ourselves from,” Keating said. “I’m a good example of what happens when you don’t. Robert, too.”
“History’s prisoners?” Jack asked.
“From an early age,” Keating said, “a family like mine instills in you a powerful Stockholm Syndrome.”
“You’ve got the key,” Jack said. “Why don’t you let yourself out?”
Keating turned to Caroline and said, “Your rude friend’s people must have short memories.”
“If you mean,” Jack said, “we don’t practice ancestor worship, you’re right.”
“You can’t worship what you don’t know,” Keating said.
“Funny,” Jack said, “from Robert’s description I assumed you’d be a gentleman.”
“I don’t feel the least uneasy in your company,” Keating said. “A gentleman,” he explained, “is comfortable in any company.”
“I thought,” Jack said, “a gentleman makes any company he’s in comfortable.”
Keating nodded and turned his back on Jack and Caroline.
“I’ll leave you to your pleasure,” he said.
After Keating had left the room, Jack nodded toward the resin work. “I think I prefer his scarecrow’s company.”
“You didn’t have to be provocative,” Caroline said.
Jack shrugged. “I’ve got status anxiety.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
“You want to play hide-and-seek with Keating in here?” Jack asked.
“I could use some air,” Caroline said. “We can call Robert at his new job tomorrow.”
They walked onto a terrace. The fading light came with a breeze and the beginning of a chill. A shadow like a shutter slid across the lake. The air was heavy; the storm was working its way up the coast.
Caroline shivered. Jack took off his sports coat and draped it around Caroline’s shoulders. She protested, but, when Jack held it around her, she didn’t shrug off his coat—or his arm.
They descended broken stone steps leading to a long arbor, dense with grapevines, heavy with grape clusters. The arbor smelled of wine. The dying sun’s horizontal light flickered stroboscopically through the green leaves, casting a netlike shadow on them.
“Do you feel like Adam and Eve being driven out of Paradise?” Caroline asked.
“Some Paradise,” Jack said.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I always figured Paradise would be a little threadbare by now.”
“And Robert’s creepy dad is God?” Jack asked.
“Well,” Caroline said, as they came upon another sculpture, of a ghastly woman, “he’s creating a race of resin.”
The resin woman was dressed in what looked like a diaphanous skirt, high-collar blouse, and wide-brimmed sun hat trimmed with plastic flowers and spattered with bird droppings. The top half of the face from the bridge of the nose to the lifelike, but dirty, forehead was lovely. Almond eyes seductively half closed. The bottom half of the face, the mouth and the chin, revealed beneath shreds of skinlike resin a grinning skull.
“Jack!” Robert’s voice hailed them. “Caroline!”
Robert appeared, backlit, at the far end of the arbor, near where they had parked.
“Dad said he saw you wandering around,” Robert said. “I thought, if I came around by your car, I’d head you off at the pass.”
Robert was in gray slacks, a white business shirt, and a beige V-neck sweater vest. His carried his suit jacket slung over a shoulder, hooked on a finger.
“Creepy place you got here,” Jack said.
Approaching, Robert waggled his head.
“Too much Poe, too early,” he said about his father. “You should see the old wine cellar. He’s got one of his sculptures half bricked up inside. My Montresor, he calls it.”
“Hallowe’en must have been a gas,” Jack said.
“Is he crazy?” Caroline asked.
“You know how much he gets for his sculptures?” Robert said. “Enough to keep this place the way it was when my grandfather was alive. If he wanted to. Collectors come and see his works in this setting, they pull out their checkbooks and start writing zeros.”
“I can write zeros in my checkbook, too,” Jack said. “Just can’t put any numbers in front of them.”
“I was delayed in town,” Robert said, “new job and all. So tea’ll be a little late today. Daddy likes it at five-thirty.”
“I don’t think I’m up for playing more games with your father, Robert,” Caroline said.
“I’ll give you something in the kitchen,” Robert said. “The kitchen’s right out of House & Garden.”
“No ghouls?” Caroline asked.
“Or cobwebs,” Robert said. “The freak show is all downstairs. In front. The rest of the house, the part we live in, is normal. Well, not exactly normal, but not designed for effect. At least, not on purpose.”
“Robert,” Jack said, “two nights ago, was your father at the Dutch Village Motel?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” Robert said. “No, I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“You didn’t like the question?” Caroline asked.
“I don’t think you had to ask it,” Robert said, looking at Jack. “We were watching TV. I’d TiVo’d The Kid From Brooklyn. My dad’s a Danny Kaye fan. And I know that makes both of our alibis dependent on each other—except for the pizza boy.”
“You have pizza delivered here?” Caroline asked.
“I give big tips,” Robert said. “That’s my vice. Frank’s vices, if he hadn’t given in to them, he’d be alive today.”
“We know about Jean,” Jack said.
“My sister,” Robert said, “half sister, shouldn’t have been in the room with Frank. Ever since Jean was a child, she’s gotten into scrapes. That’s what Daddy used to say. Jean’s in another scrape. But whatever trouble she was in, Daddy always got her out.”
“Does Daddy know she’s dead?” Jack asked.
“He knows she’s dead,” Robert said. “Neither of us is wearing crepe. We did that years ago.”
“When she started drugs and hooking?” Caroline asked.
“When she started shaking us down for money,” Robert said. “Which we would’ve given her anyway. Gave her. We paid her mother. After she died, we paid Gaynor. For her food, clothing, school. And blackmail. So they wouldn’t reveal her connection to our family. Oh, did he forget to mention that?”
“You were afraid Frank would spill the beans?” Jack asked. “That he’d tell everybody Jean was a hooker and a drug addict. And your half sister?”
Wryly, Robert said, “We’re a respectable family.”
“I can tell that from your happy home here,” Jack said. “How’d they meet?”
“At an NA meeting,” Robert said. “At least, that’s what Frank told me.”
“What else did Frank tell you?” Caroline asked.
“I didn’t want to know,” Robert said. “But Frank needed to, I don’t know, get my permission? They both wanted me, us, to know.”
“For different reasons,” Caroline said.
“Maybe not so different,” Robert said.
“I’m as good as you,” Jack said.
“That’s what Jean wanted us to know,” Robert said. “And I’m as bad as Jean.”
“That’s what Frank wanted you to know,” Jack said.
“Peck’s Bad Boy,” Robert said. “I guess that’s what Frank felt like when he did drugs, hung out with hookers.”
“Did he do that a lot?” Caroline asked.
“For all I know Jean was his first time,” Robert said. He shrugged and turned to Jack. “You knew him better than anybody. What do you think?”
“Never made Frank for a druggie,” Jack said. “He never missed work. Never needed money. Never acted like he had some secret life.”
“Until he turned up dead,” Robert said.
Caroline asked, “What happened when you found out they were—”
“Keeping company?” Robert gave a thin smile. “Daddy told me, Jean’s in trouble again,” Robert said. “Help her out.”
“And you did?” Caroline said.
“Helped them both out, huh?” Jack said. “Jean and Frank?”
“I told you,” Robert said, “I didn’t kill Frank.”
“You were watching Danny Kaye, yeah,” Jack said.
Robert shot Jack a look.
Jack said, “I’m naturally suspicious, I guess.”
“Of me?”
“Why not?”
“We’re friends.”
“When they found Frank, when I was the cops’ Top of the Pops, you didn’t come forward.”
“My father’s spent two decades hiding our relationship to Jean. I had to choose.”
“Family won out, huh?” Jack said. “I can understand that.”
“I haven’t murdered anyone recently, Jack,” Robert said. “Not even the motel clerk. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you give your detective pal a call.”
“I was wondering why the cops hadn’t contacted Jean’s father,” Jack said.
“Stepfather,” Caroline corrected him.
“My father contributes to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Fund,” Robert said.
“And helps out useful politicians?” Jack asked.
“The police apparently think it’s just a case of a hooker and a junkie running into some bad drugs,” Robert said.
“And Frank beat Jean up when he realized he’d snorted a hot toot?” Jack said. “As he was dying?”
“I went to Jean after work,” Robert said.
“That night?” Caroline asked.
Robert nodded and said, “That night. To give her money. What she really wanted was to get what’s in the trust Daddy’d set up for her. She got the income from it. Spent it. She’s gone through a lot of money in the past few years.”
“Did you know she was meeting Frank?” Caroline asked.
“She bragged about it,” Robert said.
“How much did you give her?” Caroline asked.
“A couple, three hundred,” Robert said. “But it wasn’t the money. Jean liked selling herself.”
“Especially,” Jack said, “if she could let you know about it.”
“Was she with anyone?” Caroline asked.
“Her room,” Robert said, “Galvin Avenue. Number thirty-seven, second floor back. Bathroom in the hall. A curtained alcove for a closet. I didn’t look under the bed, but I’m pretty sure she was alone.”
“Thanks,” Jack said.
“Maybe she was meeting someone,” Robert said.
“Before Frank?” Caroline asked.
“As I was pulling away from the house,” Robert said, “a car was about to turn the corner. I flashed my high beams. You know, what truckers do. To let him know I’d wait. He could turn first. He flashed back. So I started across the intersection, and the son of a bitch hit his accelerator. He almost broadsided me. In the rearview, I saw him park in front of Jean’s building and go in.…”
2
Galvin Avenue, thirty-seven, was a mustard yellow-painted red-brick Federal-style house, two stories, with a half third floor, featuring a row of eyebrow windows. Most of the windows were flanked with broken green shutters. Two stone steps led up to the front door, whose broken glass had been replaced by a cracked plywood panel. The red-and-blue colored glass fanlight above the door was, surprisingly, unbroken. The building looked more like a small factory than the ruins of the elegant home it had been a century ago. A tree with gnarled branches had covered the front yard with rotting apples. In the streetlamp light, the orange-brown mash spotted with fresher red and yellow fruit looked like an oriental carpet.
Jack and Caroline got out his car into the light rain spattering the street.
The breeze was brisker. Colder. Beyond the rooftops, the scudding clouds revealed Jupiter, bright and low in the southern sky. The storm kept coming.
“Why don’t you wait in the car?” Jack told Caroline.
“Afraid I’ll get hurt?” Caroline said.
“Afraid you’ll get in the way,” Jack said.
“Romantic bastard,” Caroline muttered, following Jack up the walk through the apple mess.
The front door opened into a urine-stinking hallway with broken metal mailboxes. Some of the box doors were peeled up, curling tongues. The ground floor had two apartments. The door of the one to the left was decorated with old Christmas lights and a soiled cloth Santa raising a happy right hand in greeting. As they passed, they triggered a mechanical ho-ho-ho. The other ground floor apartment was at the end of a long, dark hall. That door was decorated with an eighth-inch steel plate.
Jack and Caroline climbed the stairs to the second floor, where there were three apartments. One in the front. With a cracked wooden top panel. Through which Jack caught a glimpse of a skinny man in boxers facing away from the door and rummaging in a bureau drawer. The door halfway down the hallway, which on this floor was dimly illuminated by a sixty-watt bulb dangling on a plain wire, was newly painted a bright yellow.
They stopped at the apartment, second floor back. Jean’s apartment.
The door had been kicked in and hung open, dangling from the top hinge. The bottom hinge lay in the doorway, one screw still in a hole. The other two screws were scattered somewhere. Not in evidence.
“No police tape,” Jack noted.
“Robert’s right,” Jack said. “The cops aren’t knocking themselves out on this one.”
On the wall inside the apartment door, Jack felt for a light switch, flicked it on.
Jack expected Jean’s room to be bare.
When he was in college, his junior year, he’d stumbled into an affair with an older woman, twenty-four, three years his senior. She had returned to school to get her BA, and her husband, an ex-Marine, was working in Washington, D.C. Her bra unsnapped in the front, very sophisticated, Jack thought. The morning after their first night together, Jack opened the refrigerator, he found nothing but one half-empty pint of milk.
“Whores have empty refrigerators,” the woman said.
Jean, though messy, had tried to make her room comfortable. On one wall she’d hung a multicolored Indian fabric with dozens of tiny mirrors, which glinted in the light. A blue-and-rose scarf hung over a lamp. The window shades were stained and torn, but they were half hidden by new white-lace curtains. The new, white, Walmart chenille spread, rumpled and half off the bed, was already coming apart in places. The unraveling threads made the spread look as if it were covered with milkweed seeds. Beside the bed, on the floor, next to a pillow, lay a large stuffed dog and two smaller stuffed animals, a bear and a monkey.
The bureau drawers were pulled out and dumped. Sweaters and blouses, panties and bras and G-strings, socks and slacks and shorts. The wastebasket had been upended; a crumpled toilet paper wrapper, some balled-up paper towels, a rolled copy of Cosmopolitan, a tampon carefully folded into a tissue …
“The place has been tossed,” Jack said.
Covering his hand with his handkerchief, he rummaged through the cupboards over the sink and stove.
Chipped cups, glasses and plates. A half-empty box of Cap’n Crunch—which somebody had pawed through. Peanut butter, grape jelly—which had also been examined. Kid’s food.
A half-size refrigerator sat on the floor, supporting a small TV. The cable was connected. Still covering his hand with the handkerchief, Jack turned the TV on. It worked.
Jack found the remote and, using the handkerchief, ran up and down the channels.
“HBO,” Jack said. “She sprang for premium service.”
“No bills,” Caroline said. “No check book. No personal papers of any
kind.”
Behind the scattered dirty laundry pushed under the bureau, Caroline found a plastic bracelet with Jean’s name on it, a number, some other codes. The kind worn in a hospital.
“This can’t be from after her beating,” she said, handing it to Jack. “She never came back here.”
Before he even read the markings, Jack recognized the typeface, the look, of the bracelet.
“Berkshire Medical,” Jack said, examining it. “Whatever was wrong with her, she needed more than a Samaritan could give her.”
3
“AIDS?” Jack asked. He was driving Caroline’s car, heading to the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The rain was now coming down hard, drops ricocheting off the windshield like bullets. “Hepatitis?”
“Maybe she went in to detox?” Caroline said.
Jack let that sit.
After a long silence, Caroline glanced at him. Glanced away.
“Were you ever married?” she asked.
Jack kept his eyes on the road.
“It was a big mystery around the office,” she said.
Jack cranked up the defogger.
“You had quite a fan club,” she said. “They wanted to know.”
After another long silence, Jack asked, “You?”
“You want to know was I ever married?” Caroline said. “But you’re going to remain a man of mystery?”
“Fifteen years,” Jack said, fiddling with the windshield wiper. “Right out of college. Off and on a commune. It was the Sixties. One kid. Not with my wife. She never knew. I never saw the kid. One night after a party, I couldn’t sleep. Got up to pee. Realized my wife was crying. I moved out the next day.”
They drove a mile in silence.
“I’m leaving a lot out,” Jack said.
Another mile. The windshield wipers did their dance. Rain rattled on the car roof. They passed an abandoned industrial site: Half-Moon Naptha and Petroleum. Jack looked at Caroline: Had she been married? But Caroline didn’t say anything.
“Maybe you haven’t had a chance to be disappointed yet,” Jack said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1